Managing multiple, siloed communities spread across different online touchpoints can be a formidable challenge.
Disparate platforms often lead to fragmented user experiences that dilute the potential for meaningful engagement and leave valuable insights on the table.
Imagine a scenario where every interaction, every piece of feedback, and every customer query could flow seamlessly across a unified digital ecosystem, enhancing the quality of customer experience (CX) and operational efficiency in one go.
That’s precisely what a Fortune 100 tech & digital advertising giant set out to achieve when it embarked on a bold mission to consolidate its sprawling online communities. The goal was clear: break down the silos, unify digital conversations, and create a cohesive, engaging community environment that serves both the users and the company alike.
In this article, I detail how iTalent Digital helped our client achieve all this without interrupting the activities of community members and managers.
Situation overview
Our client was managing an array of online communities spread across different platforms—LumApps, Discourse, inSided, Khoros, and Higher Logic Vanilla.
The fragmented setup was degrading both user experience and operational efficiency. It created barriers to community interaction and posed challenges in delivering consistent, efficient support. Each community operated independently, requiring separate logins and navigation through varied user interfaces. This dragged down the overall brand experience and complicated community management.
The mandate was to unify the various elements into a cohesive digital community ecosystem, serving as both a vibrant engagement hub for users and an efficient support channel for the company.
The challenge
Exploring the company's online communities was like moving through a maze of related but disconnected platforms, each with its distinct rules, interfaces, and user experiences. This fragmentation weakened the brand's digital presence and obscured content, making it challenging for users to find and utilize valuable resources and expertise.
Other aspects of the challenge included:
Incongruent user experience (UX): While transitioning between communities, users faced different UX designs. This diminished the seamless experience vital for brand loyalty.
Limited access to resources and experts: The compartmentalized setup restricted easy access to content and experts, with crucial information trapped behind multiple logins and systems.
Technical complexities: The diversity of technologies across platforms introduced maintenance and update challenges, along with significant risks like potential downtime and security vulnerabilities.
The solution
The company tasked iTalent Digital with spearheading a comprehensive consolidation project that involved migrating all of its communities onto the Khoros platform. They based this choice on our successful track record of delivering managed services for its Khoros community, our long-standing partnership with Khoros, and our proven systems integration and data management expertise.
The transition to Khoros was carefully designed as a step-by-step operation. Starting with the integration of three communities as a pilot, this initial phase aimed to fine-tune the migration strategy while minimizing disruption for users. Buoyed by early success, the approach was expanded to gradually encompass all remaining communities, systematically unifying them within the Khoros framework.
Consolidation benefits
Each community was moved to a subdirectory of the primary community, rather than a separate Khoros subscription. This structure enables several advantages:
- Cost savings from having one platform subscription rather than six
- Single sign-on for users: Users can navigate through all of the communities on one platform and one authentication
- Centralized management and support: one Community team can manage all of the communities, rather than having a separate community team of resources for each one.
- More seamless and streamlined experience for users
- Better and easier access to valuable resources for customers
- Application of Khoros ACM: Consolidating the communities also allowed the benefits of Khoros Accelerated Community Management (ACM) to be applied to all of them. As detailed in a previous blog article, ACM is a robust community management tool that provides an automation framework and workflow engine in a single solution.
Comprehensive assessment and planning
To ensure a smooth and effective transition, iTalent Digital implemented a comprehensive project management and migration strategy. This included an extensive assessment of existing users, integrations, and content across all platforms to understand the scope and requirements for successful consolidation.
The initial phase involved a thorough review of each community's structure, user base, and content types. iTalent Digital’s team mapped out the intricacies of existing integrations and identified the most efficient paths for data migration.
Intelligent content migration
Utilizing advanced AI tools, iTalent Digital streamlined the migration by intelligently identifying and categorizing content. This process allowed for the elimination of outdated or irrelevant data, ensuring only valuable and pertinent information was transferred to the new Khoros platform.
Migration by the numbers
The scale of this undertaking was significant, with iTalent Digital successfully migrating over 2 million messages and nearly 40,000 users to Khoros platform. The meticulous process preserved the integrity and history of each community and laid the groundwork for a more integrated and engaging user experience in the new ecosystem.
Noteworthy post-migration metrics include:
- Reduction in management and support resource costs by 50%: now one team manages and supports all of the communities on the Khoros platform, down from five
- Thanks to the improved UX, monthly active users (MAU) immediately increased on each community following its migration to Khoros. Between the initial migration of the first three communities and the subsequent migration, the number of unique community visitors increased by 60%. After the sixth migration, unique visitors increased by another 123%.
Ready to build more synergies?
Interested in improving your users’ community experience while streamlining costs? Contact us at community@italentdigital.com to speak with us about how we can help you solve your most pressing community challenges.
iTalent Digital has more than a decade of experience implementing, customizing, extending and managing the Khoros customer engagement platform. Our full-service community center of excellence is undergirded by deep expertise in DevOps, software integrations, data analytics and visualization, unified search, change management, customer experience optimization, and data management and security. We also provide end-to-end managed services for online communities. Learn more about iTalent’s Enterprise Community Practice.
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